An extensive literature uses anthropometric measures, typically heights, to draw inferences about living standards in the past. This literature's influence reaches beyond economic history; the results of historical heights research appear as crucial components in development economics and...

In response to a high incidence of motor vehicle accidents among teens, states have adopted policies that broadly mandate restrictions on novice teen drivers, including more prelicensure education and supervised driving as well as postlicensure curfews and restrictions on the number of...

This paper develops a simple approach to overcome the shortcomings of using a standard, single treatment-effect event study to assess the ability of an empirical model to measure heterogeneous treatment effects. Equally as important, we discuss how the standard errors reported in a typical...

Economists have long neglected study of an important contractual decision, a firm's choice of legal form. Enterprise form shapes the relations among a firm's owners as well as many features of a firm's interactions with the rest of the economy. Using unusual firm-level data on Spain 1886-1936,...

A considerable theoretical and empirical literature studies the corporation's capital structure. Economists have paid less attention to capital structure in other enterprise forms such as partnerships, which typically operate under different legal constraints and appeal to smaller enterprises....

The relationship between legal forms of firm organization and economic development remains poorly understood. Recent research disputes the view that the joint-stock corporation played a crucial role in historical economic development, but retains the view that the costless firm dissolution...

Economists have long argued that introducing social insurance will reduce fertility. The hypothesis relies on standard models: if children are desirable in part because they provide security in case of disability or old age, then state programs that provide insurance against these events should...

Economists have reported econometric results that rely on estimates of the population of every country in the world for the past two thousand or more years. The underlying source is usually McEvedy and Jones' Atlas of World Population History, published in 1978. The McEvedy and Jones data have...

In most western societies, marital fertility began to decline in the nineteenth century. But in Ireland, fertility in marriage remained stubbornly high into the twentieth century. Explanations of Ireland's late entry to the fertility transition focus on the influence of the Roman Catholic Church...

Ireland's relatively late and feeble fertility transition remains poorly-understood. The leading explanations stress the role of Catholicism and a conservative social ethos. This paper reports the first results from a project that uses new samples from the 1911 census of Ireland to study...